By Enyichukwu Enemanna
President Donald Trump’s administration has reduced the number of refugees admitted annually into the country to 7,500, and they will mostly be white South Africans, believed to be affected by Pretoria’s land policy.
This represents a sharp drop from previous administrations when Washington allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution from their various countries around the world.
The Republican administration published the news Thursday in a notice on the Federal Registry.
No reason was given for the numbers, which are a dramatic decrease from last year’s ceiling of 125,000 set under Democratic President Joe Biden.
The administration had earlier said it was considering admitting as few as 7,500 refugees and mostly white South Africans.
The memo said only that the admission of the 7,500 refugees during 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
The slashed cap represents another blow for the long-standing program that until recently has enjoyed bipartisan support.
Trump suspended the programme on his first day in office and since then only a trickle of refugees have entered the country, mostly white South Africans.
Some refugees have also been admitted as part of a court case seeking to allow entry to refugees who were overseas and in the process of coming to the U.S. when the program was suspended.
The administration announced the programme for the Afrikaners in February, saying that white South African farmers face discrimination and violence at home. The country’s government strongly denies this characterization.
Across the country, groups that work to help resettle newly arrived refugees into the country have had to lay off staff as the number of people arriving under the longstanding program plummeted
